Government spending as a negative is hard to grasp for voters. To save the taxpayer, we need to figure how to express this problem in ways that voters will get.
Story by Rob Cornelius,  The State Journal, (Cross-posted from The State Journal)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — For years, too much government spending has been one of those issues that only boring people in suits cared about very publicly. They drone and complain about leaving some giant bill for our children or grandchildren or something like that.

It doesn’t really register with voters. In fact, the act of former legislative deficit hawks nationally in the mold of Sen. Bob Dole has become a hard one to see performed live. Like Vaudeville, it doesn’t seem to sell a whole lot of tickets.

Telling folks “no” is way less likely to make you popular than giving everyone still more and more “free” stuff.

Government spending as a negative doesn’t register because most voters don’t have even the most rudimentary grasp of basic economics. It only blips their personal radars when a ridiculous number is tossed out in the media, like an $1,100 toilet seat or the Obama stimulus spending a quarter million dollars to create one fake job in a House district that doesn’t actually exist.

Trouble is, this issue is crossing the Rubicon, and those who want to save the taxpayer need to figure how to express this problem in ways that voters will get.

Big picture, the big-time government spending and the deficits that result cost us money in a lot of ways.

Obviously, more spending most directly results in more taxes. Folks don’t like those. But the deficits we have at the federal level belie the fact that there isn’t enough revenue to cover all the spending that happens.

But the three other bigger keys are these. Every dollar that government taxes and spends goes through a filter of economic friction. When government spends your money, it is likely to do it more inefficiently than would happen in the private sector. More overhead costs, less efficiency.

When government spends more than it has, it must borrow money to perpetuate itself. Every time governments borrow money, and pay interest for that favor, it makes the cost of borrowing go up for everyone else in the economy. Your mortgage, your insurance, your credit card rates – anything based on your borrowing or using any asset bought with borrowed money costs more.

Worst of all, in an even more arcane point that taxpayers don’t normally get, government can print more money. This doesn’t necessarily mean they just fire up the big green Xerox machine at the mint in Philadelphia. No, there are paper transactions where the government buys and sells its own debt securities, but the net effect is the same as what happened in Germany after World War I. A bigger money supply, not from growing economy, but by fiat. Inflation comes when more currency or money of any sort chase the same pool of goods.

Simply put, all prices go up.

Take that in for a second. All prices go up. All prices go up when government spends money. It’s an easy message. But it’s true. And until governments aren’t running deficits, it still will be true.

Now we’ve just got to sell it. To figure out how to get voters to believe this is more than a bill for our grandkids, to stop kicking the can down the road like so many pension funds or a national health care plan whose true costs don’t really escalate for a few more yars.

That’s the secret of the next couple of elections — to get voters to comprehend something taught in most every entry-level macroeconomics class in every college in America.

Every time government spends a cent, the cost of virtually everything else in an economy goes up. Make a list of all the things you love that government spends dollars to buy. Then make a list of everything else. The second list is way bigger and more expensive.

Feel free to bold-face any favorites in that second list that voters hate, like seven channels of HBO for felons or free dental care for illegal Mexicans.

Now turn this message into phraseology for a 30-second ad.

Whoever on the right can make that message stick wins the next couple of election cycles. More government makes stuff cost more, so stop spending.